Hello World

You are here

Hello World

Status:

Active

Overview

Go back to the arcade to explore planets, flip some switches, and bring light to the universe.

Take on the role of the Cosmonaut and adventure through the galaxy in your quest to illuminate the universe. The player must travel to various planets, navigate internal mazes to reach each planet's core, flip the switch at the center of each planet, and then escape before it turns into a star. Each planet you light up allows you to push further into deep space and progress on your mission to bring light to the universe.

From a technical standpoint, Hello World is set in a procedural universe of near infinite scale and scope. Every planet, every platform, every object is placed according to a difficulty controlling director, that works to slowly raise the challenge of the game the further the player travels into the universe.In this universe are planets of different themes, gas giants with lower gravity, icy planets with low friction, rocky planets with many enemies, each of these themes uses a customized version of our planet generator, leading to vastly different layouts. Every layout uses rotational maze algorithms to guarantee at least one path to the center.For our art style, we utilize a massive amount of particle effects to give the game a 'living color' feel. In addition these particles implement our darkness system. When you place your light over anything in Hello World, it explodes with color and life, and remains that way for the duration of play.

Hello World goes back to the roots of the entire game industry, the arcade. It tries to capture the spirit of those times, the great leap into the unknown, the pushing of technology, and the first steps of exploration into a new medium.

Images

Click images to enlarge.

Team members:

Programming:

Zach Lindblad

Alan Huag

Michael Olson

Logan Freesh

Bryan Harbich

Eric Schmitt

Nick Jones

Chris Ueda

Art:

Chelsea Cramer

Amanda Ross

Sound:

Eric Lawson

Website:

The Center for Games and Playable Media acknowledges the support of many partners:

About CGPM

At UC Santa Cruz, researchers and students have been developing the future of games since 2006, when the Jack Baskin School of Engineering started the first undergraduate game major in the University of California system. A leader in game research, UC Santa Cruz also hosts two graduate programs with an emphasis on games — the Digital Arts and New Media M.F.A. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a games focus.